


Thought-ghosts and clear water

by lynndyre



Category: The Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Bathing/Washing, Healers, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Mentions of PTSD (in original character)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-09
Updated: 2020-02-09
Packaged: 2021-02-19 16:28:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,718
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22647778
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lynndyre/pseuds/lynndyre
Summary: Glorfindel's hand clapped Elrond's shoulder as he rose to his feet."Come out and away with me."
Relationships: Elrond Peredhel/Glorfindel
Comments: 3
Kudos: 29
Collections: 2020 My Slashy Valentine





	Thought-ghosts and clear water

**Author's Note:**

  * For [alexcat](https://archiveofourown.org/users/alexcat/gifts).



Sounds echo in Rivendell's halls. They were built open to the world, to the safety of the valley, and songs carry far among the trees and waterfalls and columns of Imladris. 

But so do screams.

In the hall without the Healing rooms, Glorfindel waited on the long bench, head tipped back to let his eyes trace the small decorative carvings that span the ceiling. Stone leaves blend into ancient flowers that fruit and are consumed by half-hidden carven squirrels. The butterflies at the edges of the leftmost span above his head dance among falling petals and falling leaves, and Meniau cried out one final time and subsided into sobbing, a low moaning anguish that broke and fell and rose again. Glorfindel's fingers traced the bandage over his arm, pressing gently, meditatively, at each renewed cry.

After a time the silence lasted, there were softer voices, and finally Elrond emerged. His eyes were tired, shadowed, as they were in the first years after Mordor. Glorfindel did not like to see that look return, nor the cant of his shoulders as Elrond relaxed from his official posture. "Meniau is sleeping now. We will hope he fares better on waking. Did you witness all of it?"

Glorfindel shook his head. "I caught the end of it, but came to the circle once the yelling had begun, and missed how it began. Something in the training fight- I don't know if word or deed or scent- brought the past too close to the surface for him. Whether he was holding the seige line again, or some earlier battle, we could not tell. But he was beyond seeing any of us as aught but the enemy. He struck at one of the trainees with intent to kill."

"I saw Sidorn. He was unmarked, but shaken, and is with his brothers. And you? I didn't see your arm."

Glorfindel shrugged eloquently. "I blocked from a bad angle, and his blade slid and still clipped me. Edarien bandaged it for me. Meniau?

Elrond lowered himself to the bench at Glorfindel's good side. "Nothing so recent as the siege. From all he will say, Meniau fears the world breaking again beneath our feet, and longs to take ship for fear the way will be closed. He is seeing us again, but clarity after such dissociation- " The passageway was quiet now, only faint voices behind doors. In the valley outside, a birdsong matched the wrens carved overhead. "I gave him the sleeping draught that Thranduil makes."

"The one you mislike using?"

"It is stronger than the healing sleep I would normally encourage, and it can be habit-forming. But it gives sleep that is deep and lasting, and it ensures there will be only good dreams."

"We all need good dreams." Glorfindel set his left hand on Elrond's back, as grounding a touch as he could make it. "Did you find what set things off?"

Elrond gripped Glorfindel's knee in return, heedless of the dust still marking his clothes, then released it, and folded his hands together in thought. "Not with certainty. But if it was when the training circle closed in, and it took him back so far... there was a game the servants of the enemy played in the last years of Beleriand, if they could cut elves away from the main army. A game of single combat, but with enemies on all sides."

Glorfindel's hand shifted over Elrond's shoulderblade, fingering a strand of dark hair. "That would fit. There are parts of those years I am ...content to have missed."

And today took Glorfindel's mind further back in time even than that, before his first death, to the last time he was wounded, with intent, by another elven hand. Thought-ghosts were waiting there that he would rather not revive. Different ghosts haunted the depths of Elrond's eyes, as a healer who had been unable to reach his power since the last war.

A shared breath. Another moment, and Glorfindel clapped Elrond's shoulder as he rose to his feet.  
"You have aided everyone as much as they can be helped, here. Come out and away with me."

***

Leaving the main house, Glorfindel stepped down from the wider path onto the grasses, and set his boots aside by the river's edge, before walking out into the water along the half submerged stones. Elrond paused, watching Glorfindel's pale feet beneath the surface, then stooped to remove his own shoes, leaving them beside his outer robes on the path, where the long fabric would not tangle or wet itself in the river as he followed.

Elrond knew his valley, more deeply now since he had risked the touch of Vilya on his finger and felt every slope and tree and being within it, but Glorfindel led him to a pool he had not visited in body in many years. It was fed by a small waterfall far along the valley where the wartime encampments had been built in the last years of the Second Age, where the temporary housing and stabling no longer stood, having been dismantled in the intervening decades. The lands of Middle Earth healed and forgot more swiftly than its eldest peoples.

But the pool was clear, and freshly fed, and at an elevation of the slope that caught the afternoon sun, angling down the valley wall to warm the stones beneath their unshod feet, and dry the soft moss at the pool's edges.

Elrond helped Glorfindel to disrobe, keeping the cut sleeve of his tunic from snagging on his bandages, and finally unwrapping all Edarien's handiwork. Glorfindel last pulled free the clasp and shook out his hair, spilling messy gold out from his high ponytail and raking his hands through the tendrils where sweat had dried near his face. When he stepped into the water he stood as exposed as the moment he had been restored to the living world, and yet it was Glorfindel's bare wrist extended out to Elrond that seemed the most naked. With his bracers removed after the events of the practice field, and not yet changed for the musical bracelets he preferred to wear off duty, the veins of Glorfindel's arm were close to the surface, and split off either side of the vulnerable tendons of his wrist.

Elrond took the outstretched hand, and followed him into the water.

There was no set ritual to it, this thing which Glorfindel had shared with Elrond; never in speech, but in moments of communion and shared thought. It was simply to allow himself to _be_. To feel, and exist, in awareness of only that, as he had become aware of all bodily sensations and outside phenomena when he first drew breath again in Aman. To recenter himself, grounding spirit within body by sensation and thought.

The pool was warm at the surface, colder where he stepped down among the deeper rocks. At its highest, the water rose only to their thighs, though Glorfindel had sunk to the bottom to wet his hair and face. Elrond stepped into the waterfall, and let it wash cold over his head. His belly, unfed since breaking his fast late in the morning, curled between hunger and anticipation. Elrond drank from the falls, feeling the water, tasting with lips and tongue and throat, every sense of it new until he could feel it pooling cool within him, slowly joining the heat of his body. And then he simply stood, and let the water pour down.

When Glorfindel kissed him, still under the falls, it tasted like water, like the rocks of Imladris the water had touched. Glorfindel's embrace was warm, and brief; acknowledging and then retreating, each of them into their own thoughts.

When Elrond stepped free of the water, he laid himself down on the ground beside Glorfindel, still unclad. The sun was still on the valley wall, the afternoon lengthening towards evening. He felt the smooth stones, the sun-warm moss, blades of grass bending against his skin as the earth bore him up. A beetle clicked its wing casings and crawled delicately over his wrist, and farther down the valley bird and elven songs blended. Somewhere a single forge was lit, the smoke carrying faint and intermittent with the movement of air.

Arien shone yellow above them, closing in on the valley's rim. Elrond looked up into the heat of her gaze, until his sight blurred with it and tears slid free down his temples. There was no shame, only a welling rush of feeling, of intensity and heat that made him gasp, twisting his fingers in the grass. The waterfall had washed away sweat and the smells of blood and fear and anguish, now Elrond let the sun burn away the echoes of past wars, let the valley beneath him belie the breaking of the world, and his own inability to mend it.

Arien dipped below the valley wall, and the evening breeze stirred cool against Elrond's skin. 

He felt lighter, suffused with clarity, as he rolled to face Glorfindel, who glowed, open-eyed and sleeping, in the receding sunlight. He had not re-wrapped his arm, after bathing, and Edarien's neat stitches were weeping spots of red, with purple spreading beneath and up to his shoulder. Meniau had struck with desperation lending him strength.

Elrond reached for the wound, setting his fingertips against the bruise that shadowed Glorfindel's skin. His body stopped at the touch of flesh on flesh. But for the first time in more than half a yeni, his spirit did not stop at his own skin, but reached still forward, into the body before him. Into the tissues suffused with old blood, where he urged the bruises to recede. Into the edges of the wound, which met each other gladly under his hand. He could feel Glorfindel wake from within his body, and know that it was without pain.

This time Elrond moved first, and Glorfindel answered, as Elrond set himself above his partner and bore him down into the grass at the water's edge.

Perhapse Meniau would sail. And memories still held the possibility of torment, for all who had lived long in Middle Earth. But curled together in the evening song, as Arien faded from view and Tilion rose to follow her path, Elrond and Glorfindel grounded themselves in joy.


End file.
